You Can Speak Up: Vrasidas Golemis

With the help of Amnesty International, ADC Member Vrasidas Golemis makes Captcha's actually useful.

by Lauren Festa

ADC Member and Art Director Vrasidas Golemis, along with copywriter Ryan Sparrow are putting Captcha’s to good use. This is a code you don’t have to decipher. In fact, you are encouraged to right the wrong that the Captcha presents. For example, the code might read “REFUGEE INVADER”. Wherein you would enter the text from the image, the only way to access the next page is “DO NOT TYPE THE INJUSTICE”. In this example, instead of typing what we see, we would type the change we want to see: i.e, “REFUGEE WELCOMED.”

There are so many causes asking for our attention. From Twitter to Facebook, Instagram and your regular morning news tabs. Scrolling through a constant deluge of stories makes every issue feel far away from our everyday lives. Sad but true, as Vrasidas puts it, “it becomes easy to not care.”

But, when young adults take action online, we can make the world a better place. Not only are we internet savvy, we’re great agents of change, and there’s a lot of us. That’s why Amnesty International decided to hack the internet to help young adults see that they can fight human rights abuses just by speaking out against them online.

“YOU CAN SPEAK UP”. How it works: Whenever internet users have to use the CAPTCHA system to type in passwords, their word choices will be descriptions of human rights abuses that marginalized people worldwide encounter. Instead of asking the users to type the words, we tell them, “DO NOT TYPE THE INJUSTICE”. The only answers that will work are ones that reflect a world free of injustice. Get the full scope on their website and the next time a Captcha incredulously asks if you’re not a robot, prove it with “You Can Speak Up” and Amnesty International.

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